Genbox Terminology

The terminology for some of the features found in Genbox is explained below. Other products may have different
names for equivalent features.

Charts vs. Reports

Genbox considers a genealogy "chart" output to be primarily graphical
with multiple layout options and can be saved in an image format; a "report" is primarily
text with fewer layout options, and can be saved in RTF
format.

Styles
and content can be assigned according to membership in individual groups, to visually
distinguish particular genealogical lines, surnames, key individuals, or any
arbitrarily defined group. Styles include fonts for each type of text, box
shapes (independently selected for box head and tail), shadows, fills, line
styles, and colors. Content for individuals can be any combination of
identifiers, attributes, events, pictures, and notes. The "individual
groups" are defined as key individuals, direct lines of the key
individuals, members of a predefined list of individuals, or members of the
results of a query. Content can be
independently selected for primary and spouse. Extra flags and even icons can be
added to further identify groups of individuals.

Source citations can be included on all charts and reports. On charts, source
citations appear in the Legend Box. If you have many citations on a single
chart, multiple legend boxes will automatically be created.

Individual content on reports can be varied according to the role the
individual plays in different parts of the report: primary, preferred spouse,
other spouse, child carried forward, child not carried forward. For each of
these roles, the identifiers, attributes, events, event detail, contacts,
contact detail, parents, general notes, research notes, and media can be
separately selected.

For the narrative reports, an advanced context handler has the job of
identifying and reducing redundancy in the output, to create a more professional
text flow. While simple reductions include the use of "he" and
"she" when the subject of the current sentence is the same as the
last, and the use of "there" for a repeating place name, advanced
reductions include the extraction of a common birth place or death place from a
group of child paragraphs and placement into the leading sentence, as in:
"John and Martha (Davis) Johnson had three children, all born in
Petersburg, Virginia:".

Another reduction occurs when certain events occur in pairs; Genbox will create
a compound sentence joining them with "and".

Another job of the context processor is ordering sentence parts by their surety
levels, so that the parts with higher surety appear first. Surety levels can be
automatically qualified. Suppose the selected event part order for a narrative
report was "date first followed by place". Then, suppose for a given
event, the surety on the date is lower than the surety on the place. Genbox will
reorganize the sentence to show the place first. It will produce a sentence like
"George died most likely in Handlebrook, Maine, perhaps in 1842."

An event like "married" is considered bidirectional; if "Joe
married Jane in 1937", then it is also correct to say "Jane married
Joe in 1937". An event template of the form "[P] married [S]"
works well, regardless of which individual is currently considered
"Primary" and which is currently considered the "Spouse".
Other events between two people can be directional: "Joe proposed to Jane
in 1932". Simply reversing primary and spouse in this case would not work.
Instead, a sentence of the form "Jane received a marriage proposal from
John in 1932" is needed. Genbox allows event templates to be directional:
you can define separate event templates for the forward and reverse directions.
In this case, the forward template would be "[P] proposed to [S] [D+L]",
and the reverse template could be "[P] received a marriage proposal from
[S] [D+L]". Then, when a narrative report is generated with either
individual as the focus, the correct sentence will be generated.

Each fact, or assertion, stored in Genbox can be separately documented. For
events, that means you can have a source citation on just the date, just the
local site, just the place, just the reported age, etc. You can also attach a
source citation to the event as a whole. Multiple sources can be cited in support for a single fact. For each source
supporting a fact, the support level and credibility level can be specified.
Weighing these variables, you can assign an overall surety level to the fact.
Genbox even supports storing the individual name variants exactly as they appear
in each source, which can be helpful later in resolving research problems. Each
source citation can also have associated "lead text", annotation text,
and excerpt text, for plenty of opportunities to accurately record your source
citations in the most helpful way.